You've Never Seen Everything

Nobody's making me say this
 I'm talking to you
 Been travelþing 17 hours
 Irradiated by signals, by images
 of viruses, of virtues
 like everyone
 Like exiled angels we swing out of the clouds
 Above night city-
 Fields of light broken by the curve of dark waterways
 On the other side of the world
 an unhappy teenage girl sets fire
 to herself, her house, her neighbourhood and some that dwell therein
 Sorry simulacrum of sad dawn
 You've never seen everything
 Sleep of the just, sleep of reason, any damn kind of sleep please!
 I'm trying to balance on a sloping bed in Naples
 or is it Skopje? I forget
 Through the thin hotel wall a man groans in his dreams
 And on the other side of the world
 the drug squad busts a child's birthday party
 Puts bullets in the family dog and the blood goes all over the baby
 And the Mounties are strip-searching schoolgirls
 because they can
 And a car crashes and burns on an offramp from the Gardiner
 Two dogs in the back seat die, and in the front
 a man and his mother
 Forensics reveals the lady has pitchfork wounds in her chest -
 Pitchfork!
 And that the same or a similar instrument has been screwed to the dash
 to make sure the driver goes too
 You've never seen everything
 I see:
 A leader of the people with a ring in his nose
 And the leaders of business tell him which way to go
 With tugs on the golden chain which once led the golden calf
 And we're supposed to be impressed with their success
 But my mind goes blank before the unbelievable indifference
 shown life
 spirit
 the future
 anything green
 anything just
 Bad pressure coming down
 Tears - what we really traffic in
 ride the ribbon of shadow
 Never feel the light falling all around
 Years ago when my brother was in India
 A small town baker got a bright idea
 He cut his flour with pesticide
 and sent a bunch of neighbours on their longest journey
 He was just being cheap -trying to make a profit
 Didn't even have shareholders to answer to
 But it's worth remembering, as we sell off the forest
 gene-splice the world's food into an instrument of control
 maim and destroy as acts of theatre,
 what came next -
 That when the survivors looked around
 and understood what had been done
 they butchered
 that baker
 Snow swirls in the parking lot light like flour
 like pesticide There's a trade war brewing - or at least that's the face they paint on it
 But it's only more transnational manipulation
 It's all bad magic and gangrene politics
 Hormone disruptors and carcinogenetics
 Greed twists eternal in the human breast
 But the market has no brain
 It doesn't love it's not God
 All it knows is the price of lunch
 Here I sit
 Staring at my own shadow
 Feeling my blood move
 Trying not to have a drink
 Trying to find somewhere to put the rage I'm carrying
 Bad pressure coming down
 Tears - what we really traffic in
 ride the ribbon of shadow
 Never feel the light falling all around
 Never feel the light falling all around
 You've never seen everything